Staff Software Engineer, AI Voice and Content

Gusto is on a mission to grow the small business economy, handling payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR for over 500,000 small businesses nationwide. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, Gusto is building a workplace that reflects the people it serves. All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs).

We are looking for a seasoned full-stack software engineer to join Gusto's Growth team and lead the next generation of AI-powered customer acquisition, onboarding, and lifecycle engagement experiences. This role focuses on two strategic areas: building an AI Voice Agent that supports onboarding of new customers, and building and scaling AI-driven email experiences across the funnel powered by our LLM-powered content generation engine. The expectation is clear ownership of production workflows and measurable customer impact within Growth.

• Design, build, and operate AI-powered Growth experiences across onboarding and lifecycle engagement, with a focus on conversational and communication-driven product surfaces.
• Own the technical strategy and implementation for an AI Voice Agent that helps onboard customers, including product workflows, backend integrations, safety controls, and evaluation loops.
• Build and scale AI-driven email systems across the funnel including generation workflows, orchestration, experimentation, quality controls, and iteration.
• Partner closely with Product, Data, Design, Marketing, and Platform teams to identify Growth opportunities and ship improvements that move acquisition, activation, and conversion metrics.
• Design reliable APIs, backend services, and frontend experiences that support personalized onboarding, communications, workflow automation, and other customer-facing Growth journeys.
• Establish strong engineering patterns for applied AI development, including prompt design, tool integration, evaluation-driven iteration, observability, and safe rollout practices.
• Help the team make good long-term architectural decisions around conversational systems, outbound communication workflows, and supporting platform capabilities.
• Mentor other engineers and raise the bar on technical execution, product quality, and responsible use of AI.

• 8+ years of software development experience building and shipping customer-facing product experiences at scale.
• Experience building full-stack systems, including frontend applications, backend APIs, and production services with clear ownership after launch.
• Experience in Growth-related product areas such as onboarding, communications, workflow automation, CRM, lifecycle marketing, or adjacent customer journey systems.
• Strong applied AI fluency, including experience with prompt design, tool integration, conversational experiences, content generation systems, or evaluation-driven iteration.
• Experience owning multi-quarter initiatives that solve ambiguous engineering problems and produce measurable business and customer impact.
• Strong product and engineering judgment, with the ability to balance experimentation speed with quality, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
• Ability to collaborate effectively across engineering and business stakeholders.
• A track record of mentoring engineers and helping teams scale their impact.
• Experience in or interest working in Ruby on Rails.
• Appreciation for a collaborative, test-driven environment.
• Ability to build well-structured, maintainable, well-documented code.
• Ability to effectively communicate across engineering teams and with business stakeholders.

Cash compensation is targeted at $163,000–$204,000 in Denver & most remote locations, and $197,000–$247,000 for San Francisco & New York. Stock equity is additional. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise. All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs).

This role is based in San Francisco, CA and is Hybrid. Employees based in Denver, San Francisco, or New York City will be expected to work from the office on designated days approximately 2-3 days per week (or more depending on role). Travel to Gusto's office for onboarding is required.

Apply through the provided Greenhouse job posting link.